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COUNTY LINES; Here's a Way to Save: Get This Book at the Library

LIKE many in Westchester, I have a mortgage to pay and children under age 9 to eventually send to college, and sometimes I figure that the only way to deal with all the bills successfully is for Daddy Warbucks to adopt me.

Our financial futures, to be sure, are no joking matter. But if those of us with small children can't laugh at footing who knows how much a year for college by the time the children are ready, we'll have to cry.

Hoping to avoid the tears, I turned to Dave Barry, a fellow graduate of the memorably named Wampus Elementary School in Armonk. Mr. Barry, who, like me, has no idea what a Wampus is, may be our nation's most popular humor writer. Although he is frequently associated with Florida because he gained fame as a syndicated columnist for The Miami Herald, Mr. Barry is from Westchester. Like me, he grew up on the less-than-mean streets of Armonk. That's why, when I read an excellent review of Mr. Barry's latest book, I knew I had to give him a call.

Mr. Barry's new book, "Dave Barry's Money Secrets, Like: Why Is There a Giant Eyeball on the Dollar?" (Crown Publishers, $24.95), gives tongue-in-check advice while spoofing financial self-help books. It focuses on the macro-picture, but, Mr. Barry still has plenty of advice on how to financially survive life in Westchester, where that house down the street that looks like a million bucks sells for $4.57 million.

"People have asked me similar advice about the Florida Keys," Mr. Barry said, "and in terms of Westchester, I'd just tell them the same: Buy property in Armonk 50 years ago. I urge everyone to buy as much as possible back then."

Buying in the past gives the investor the benefit of foresight, Mr. Barry said, which is what you need. Back when his father bought land in Westchester for $2,000 and built a house on it, this was a contrarian's play, something every canny investor looks to do.

"Armonk had no cachet then," Mr. Barry said. "Just bars."

My follow-up question was one many of our children will grow up asking themselves. How will any of them afford to live in the county they grew up in? They won't have to, Mr. Barry said.

When people in Westchester sell a home in coming years, he said, "the kids will stay there." He explained: "It will be a clause in the sales contract: 'My son will stay in his bedroom throughout adulthood.' "

Mr. Barry noted that in Armonk, many people had become used to the largess of I.B.M. After all, as the world headquarters of I.B.M., Armonk for years received ample tax revenue from the company.

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"They even paid for the trombones for the school band, didn't they?" Mr. Barry asked. "They would fly over the village and drop dollars from a helicopter."

But I.B.M. has moved much of its operations elsewhere, even as Armonk has become bigger, with an ever-increasing tax burden for residents. These days, I.B.M.'s contribution is relatively smaller. What was Mr. Barry's advice on how to pay less in property taxes without ending up in prison?

None of his advice, Mr. Barry cautioned, precluded the possibility of going to prison. The only thing he could come up with on the semi-legal side was to play poor when the local tax collector came by the house by putting your old Bentley on cinderblocks in the lower portion of the front yard.

With so much now settled, I asked Mr. Barry about that widely shared sorrow: college costs. With a keen eye for turning financial conventions on their heads, or maybe dropping them on their heads, he immediately set me straight.

"Bad colleges are way cheaper," he said. "But bad colleges require bad grades." To this end, Mr. Barry said that parents should really crack the whip.

"When grades start creeping up," Mr. Barry said, "take action."

He does not think that many Westchester children, after stumbling through school, will want to make a living through humor writing because, he said, it is frighteningly close to manual labor. For a better-than-subsistence-level living that can have you paying rent on that room in your parent's old home, he suggests leverage and branding.

"I don't know what they are," Mr. Barry said, "but they are good."

I don't know if his advice will get me a private plane on standby anytime soon. But I thanked him for his time and thought.

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A version of this article appears in print on January 29, 2006, on Page WC14 of the National edition with the headline: COUNTY LINES; Here's a Way to Save: Get This Book at the Library. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe